Good-Bye Localhost: A Cloud-Based Web IDE for Teaching Java EE Web Development to Non-Computer Science Majors

Abstract

While cloud-and web-based Integrated Development Environments (IDE) are used in practice and education for some time, these are mainly intended for classical web development. Support for enterprise platforms such as Java Enterprise Edition (EE) is typically lacking. However, in higher education, web-based cloud IDE are particularly useful in software development courses for non-computer science major students, since they could help to overcome the participants' limited IT skills. Thus, a respective easy-to-use web IDE is required. Therefore, in this paper a software platform for a web-based cloud IDE for educational purposes is proposed and evaluated, which in particular supports Java EE and is suitable for non-computer science majors. The platform was evaluated in a classroom experiment. The results indicate that it is useful and beneficial for the students, allowing the lecturer and the students to focus more on the actual learning objectives.